Isolating highlights

January 28, 2010 9:54 AM

Is there a fast way to isolate highlighted text from a document?

I have a document (in OpenOffice, but it can be converted to a Word .doc) with several short phrases highlighted. Is there an automatic way to look at only those highlighted phrases?

posted by LSK to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Totally a hack job and not "isolating" per se, but you could change the font colour of the whole document to be the same as the background and as long as the highlight was a colour that white would show up against, you could look at it that way - though it really depends on what you want to isolate them for to determine whether what I've just said would actually be useful...
posted by urbanlenny at 10:25 AM on January 28, 2010

Best answer: By "look at," do you mean you just want to be able to easily advance from one instance of highlighted text to the next? Or do you mean you want to delete all non-highlighted text?

In Word 2007 (and I think also in Word 2003, although the exact terms may vary), if you mean the former, you can do Ctrl-F, More>>, Format, Highlight. Repeatedly clicking "Find Next" will then take you to each instance of highlighted text sequentially.

If you mean the latter, Ctrl-H, More>>, click in the "Find What" box, Format, Highlight, Format, Highlight [doing this twice will change the format listed to "Not Highlight"], leave the "Replace with" box blank, and click "Replace All." Note: non-highlighted spaces and paragraph breaks are also deleted, so the instances of highlighted text may be smooshed together by this.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:33 AM on January 28, 2010 [2 favorites]